It's really quite interesting to see the wide range of people who frequent this forum. There are people who don't even know whether konnichiwa ends in a "wah" sound or "hah" sound, and there are also people who are so insanely fluent that one has to wonder if the sheer joy of teaching has kept them around here for so long .

I'll say that I'm somewhere vaguely in the middle of those two extremes. I've studied with the japan times books; Finished genki 1/2, finished most of the way through "An integrated approach to intermediate Japanese", and lastly went somewhat through "kanji look and learn" before deciding to do my own thing with Anki. Which brings me to my dilemma...

I found this site through www.japandigest.net recommending this place, which is one of many good beginner sites on the web, but alas I am not. I came here in search of people who could recommend me sites and resources for the upper intermediate learner. I am unfortunately still not fluent enough to read novels on my own, and yet I'm too fluent for most of the learning resources you can come across on the web... I feel as though I've sort of plateau'd and am stuck.

Since there's a good number of advanced users on this site, I'm wondering if you could tell me what you did to keep progressing when you got to this upper intermediate stage I'm at right now.

For your level, I would recommend a book called 'Read Real Japanese' which is a great bridge between 'textbook' and 'real japanese' just as it claims. This site's sponsor store even sells it (I feel I have to point that out since I've mentioned quite a few 'competitor' sites and products... although I actually bought my copy of this particular book at, errm, barnes and noble. Shhh. Don't tell the admins!)

Wow that's a big link. I hope it works.There's another volume for it also, for non-fiction, that I don't have but should get... the companion volume doesn't seem to be available from thejapanshop though.

If you like manga and anime, of course, you can turn the subtitles off on your American-bought anime discs and can buy imported manga most of which has furigana. Manga actually has a ton of challenges that are different from reading prose fiction, mostly to do with colloquial speech, but it's one way to stave off the problem of not knowing 2000+ kanji (unless, of course, you're already kanji literate.)

This page on kid's goo has a bunch of, ahem, 'easy' articles that introduce topics followed by links to more in-depth articles around the web. You may want to pick an article, give it a cursory reading, add unknown vocabulary to anki, and come back to the same article a re-read a week later. http://kids.goo.ne.jp/shirabemono/index.html

This site has manga and light novels that you can read for free, but it can be a bit awkward to use the client they have. You can't print them out or download them, but on the other hand, it's a legit site.http://www.j-comi.jp/